The funding ban is just the latest salvo in the government’s attacks on the renewable energy sector which also includes small-scale solar projects.

Good.

Mr Hockey started the Abbott government’s campaign against wind farms in 2014 when he told Sydney radio host Alan Jones he found the massive turbines “utterly offensive”. Prime Minister Abbott reignited the debate last month, telling Jones he finds turbines “visually awful”. He said he wanted to reduce the growth rate of the sector as much as possible.

Joe Hockey has come good big time, clearly following the lead of his boss.

The decision will please anti-wind government members but wind industry insiders, who declined to comment on the record, told Fairfax Media the decision is a “big blow”. One said that while it will not sink the industry altogether, it will make things harder.

Head of Australia at Bloomberg New Energy Finance Kobad Bhavnagri​ said the decision would have a “significant” impact on the industry.

As Breitbart London reported last month, the UK-born Mr Abbott (his family moved to Australia from London when he was aged three), who once famously dismissed the argument behind anthropogenic climate change as “absolute crap”, has never carried his disdain for wind farms lightly.

In June he told a radio interviewer a cycling trip to an island off the Western Australia state capital Perth had rammed home his personal dislike for wind generators. He added that he wants “fewer” wind farms in Australia and is keen for an inquiry into their health impacts.

“When I’ve been up close to these things, not only are they visually awful, but they make a lot of noise,” Mr Abbott told Sydney broadcaster Alan Jones. “Up close, they’re ugly, they’re noisy and they may have all sorts of other impacts.

“It’s right and proper that we’re having an inquiry into the health impacts of these things.”

I wonder what the Libs would want as a trade for Abbott in exchange for Joyce?

As the government unveiled new powers for local residents to block turbines blighting their villages, Mr Paterson condemned many planned schemes as ‘deeply unpopular’ and causing ‘huge unhappiness’ across the country.

Barack Obama is being sued by some dodgy Chinese company who is upset at being told the eff off. Apparently there is some sort of security risk…personally I’d ban them just because they are awful bird blenders junking up the skyline:

A Chinese-owned firm in the US is suing President Barack Obama after he blocked a wind farm deal on national security grounds.

Ralls Corp, a private firm, acquired four wind farm projects near a US naval facility in Oregon earlier this year.

Mr Obama signed the order blocking the deal last week. The lawsuit alleges the US government overstepped its authority.

It is the first foreign investment to be blocked in the US for 22 years.

The block on the wind farms comes just weeks ahead of November’s US presidential election.

China’s state-run news agency Xinhua said “China-bashing” in order “to woo some blue-collar voters” was the reason for the decision.

Mr Obama has been criticised by the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, for not taking a tough enough line with China over trade and investment practices.

Indeed, Mr Romney has said he will label China as a “currency manipulator” if he is elected.

US politicians have long alleged that China keeps its currency artificially low giving its exports an unfair advantage and, in turn, costing the US jobs. That is denied by Beijing.

But many Chinese officials are now used to the four-year election cycle when increasingly China has become the whipping boy.

One official who worked at the Chinese embassy in Washington told me that the heated rhetoric is not taken too seriously in Beijing.

While the US election is being followed in China, the focus here is the country’s own once-in-a-decade leadership transition, which will get under way next month.

The move forced Ralls Corp to divest its stake in the projects, which were located near restricted airspace used by the Naval Weapons Systems Training Facility.

This study is going to put the shits up the Greens…it appears that gas is greener than wind:

Building gas-fired power plants instead of more offshore wind farms could actually lead to greater carbon savings at a lower cost, a leading think-tank has claimed.

In a report today, Policy Exchange argued that the government should scrap 4GW of its planned 13GW target for offshore wind generation by 2020.

By building cheaper gas generation instead it could save £700-£900m a year in costs that would have been passed onto billpayers, it calculated.

These savings could be redeployed by insulating hundreds of thousands more homes and doubling public funding for research and development in key low-carbon technologies, it said.

That would still leave enough money to “buy and retire sufficient carbon permits each year to reduce emissions by six times as much as the 4GW of offshore wind”.

It argued: “To achieve maximum overall emissions reduction and low carbon innovation, the electricity market needs to be allowed to invest in gas as a transition fuel, subject to a long-term EU emissions cap.”

Even if gas-fired power plants had to be retired early because of the EU’s emissions cap, it would still be a “far cheaper” interim solution than building offshore wind while the costs remain so high, it said.